East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis
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EAST COAST ODE TO HOWARD JARVIS Tiny Kushner Dramaturge Guide complied by Lindsay Kujawa HOWARD JARVIS (wikipedia article) Jarvis was born in Magna, Utah, and died in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Utah State University. In Utah he had some political involvement working with his father's campaigns and his own. His father was a state Supreme Court judge and, unlike Jarvis, a member of the Democratic Party. Howard Jarvis was active in the Republican Party and also ran small town newspapers. Although raised Mormon, he smoked cigars and drank vodka as an adult. He moved to California in the 1930s due to a suggestion by Earl Warren. Jarvis bought his home at 515 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in Los Angeles for $8,000 in 1941. By 1976, it was assessed at $80,000. He married his third wife, Estelle Garcia, around 1965. Jarvis was a Republican primary candidate for the U.S. Senate in California in 1962, but the nomination and the election went to the liberal Republican Thomas Kuchel. Subsequently, he ran several times for Mayor of Los Angeles on an anti-tax platform and gained a reputation as a harsh critic of government. An Orange County businessman, he went on to lead the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and spearheaded Proposition 13, the California property tax-cutting initiative passed in 1978 which slashed property taxes by 57% and initiated a national tax revolt. Jarvis and his wife collected tens of thousands of signatures to enable Prop. 13 to appear on a statewide ballot, for which he garnered national attention. The ballot measure passed with nearly two-thirds of the vote.Two years later, voters in Massachusetts enacted a similar measure. Regarding the motives of Jarvis in promoting Proposition 13 and the role its passage had in rent control subsequently being enacted in most large cities in California, Greg Katz has written: "There was little doubt from his rhetoric that Howard Jarvis, who penned Prop. 13 with his on-again-off-again political ally Paul Gann, hated taxes of all kinds. But his intentions were, at best, turbid; Jarvis was at the time employed by the Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association as a lobbyist. In a fundraising letter to the landlords that employed him, he claimed, 'We are the biggest losers' if Prop. 13 fails. (Not to mention: The Yes on 13 headquarters were located in a Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association office.) He tried to persuade renters to vote for Prop. 13 by saying it would drive down rents, by decreasing the property taxes that landlords paid. Post-13 news reports found rents weren’t going down, despite Jarvis’s promises – apparently landlords were just pocketing their property tax savings. That revelation prompted many of the rent controls still in effect around California." San Francisco community activist Calvin Welch has stated "Jarvis was the father of rent control.” Mark Evanier has dubbed him a "horrible man" and summed up Jarvis' years as a lobbyist for landlords with these words: "He spent a lot of time 'n' money trying to ram through bills that said, in essence, that if I'm your landlord, I can do any damn thing I want to you, including tearing up contracts and raising your rent or evicting you whenever I feel like it." In 1980, he had a cameo appearance in the film Airplane!, playing an incredibly patient taxicab passenger. This was an inside joke that people outside California were probably unaware of since Jarvis, a champion of fiscal responsibility, spent the entire movie sitting in an empty cab waiting for the driver to return, with the meter running all the while. Jarvis had the final line in the movie, which he said after the end credits. Still sitting in the cab with the fare at $113 and still rising (equivalent to $323 in 2014), having not moved at all, he looks at his watch and says "Well, I'll give him another twenty minutes, but that's it!" OVERVIEW OF NEW YORK IN THE 1990’s “By the final days of March 1990, New York was a city staggered - reeling from a crack-fueled cascade of soaring murders and plummeting morale.Flags flew at half-mast for the 87 victims of the Happy Land arson fire, but greater carnage loomed: The nation's murder capital suffered a record 2,245 homicides by year's end. City streets were awash in drugs and illegal weapons. Brazen dealers controlled entire intersections. Crack was king, with its subjects spread across the five boroughs. The inmates, in one case, actually ran the asylum: A convicted killer escapedRikers Island by driving off in a correction captain's blue station wagon.” - JONATHAN LEMIRE , ROCCO PARASCANDOLA , LARRY MCSHANE DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS Saturday, April 10, 2010, 9:05 PM During the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s New York was considered one of the world’s most dangerous city’s. During the late 80’s to early 90’s the city reached record crime rates due to the crack epidemic that took hold of the city. In 1990 there were 2,245 murders that took place in New York City alone. Beyond the high crime rate, corruption ran rampant within public service with government employees often turning a blind eye to serious issues ranging from mob crime to garbage services. New York’s streets were dangerous with the threat of stepping on an HIV/AIDS infected needle a terrifying reality. Times Square looks nothing like the shiny family friendly center it is today; instead it was filled with mob-run strip clubs and adults stores around every corner. Since the early 90’s New York has changed drastically. While people are very polarized on their opinions of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's crack down on crime, there is no arguing that his actions did lower crime and corruption rates throughout the city. When Guliani took office he set out with a mission to increase police vigilance of small petty crimes (drug dealing, small theft crimes, etc). Crime rates have dropped 80% since the early 90’s with 2013 setting a new record low of 333 homicides committed throughout the year. Crime rates not only saw a drop in New York City, but across the country with a 40% decrease in crime seen nationwide. In addition to Guiliani’s legacy of being tough on crime, he also can be attributed to the cleaning up of Times Square. When Disney’s Lion King was looking for a permanent location they refused to consider New York due to its anti-family atmosphere, especially around Times Square. Guiliani worked with City Officials and Disney to clean up the area and turn it into what is today. Although Guliani’s legacy may have some remarkable moments, there has also been negative fallout. Since the early 90’s the New York State penitentiary systems has seen a 65% increase in occupancy with the majority of the prisoners being of minority backgrounds, especially young African-American males. New York has also turned from a blue collar city, to one targeted towards the wealthy. While it was once true that a middle-class family could live in Manhattan, that reality is now a thing of the past due to the astronomical increase in rent. Not only has New York City’s rent increased drastically, but many New Yorker’s feel the city is now marketed as a playground for the rich and as such has lost much of what made New York the eclectic city it once was. NEW YORK CITY CRIMES IN THE NINETIES The New Yorker DECEMBER 5, 2012 BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN Last week, the N.Y.P.D. made a cheerful and unexpected announcement: on Monday, November 26th, for “the first time in memory,” there hadn’t been a shooting, stabbing, or slashing anywhere in the five boroughs. (One man, a teen-ager from the Bronx, shot himself in the leg by accident; that didn’t count.) There was almost certainly weaponless violence last Monday, and it goes without saying that there’s been plenty of violence the rest of the year. But it’s also true that the city is less violent now than it’s been for nearly fifty years. In 1990, there were two thousand two hundred and forty-five murders in New York. This year, there are likely to be fewer than four hundred. Throughout the nineteen-nineties, The New Yorker tracked this extraordinary turnaround. Barbara Goldsmith’s “Women on the Edge,” from 1993, gives you a rough idea of how high the stakes were in the early nineties. The article is a grim introduction to the routinely desperate world of New York City prostitution. Goldsmith shadows Dr. Joyce Wallace, one of the first doctors to study the AIDS epidemic, as she single-handedly tries to stop the spread of H.I.V. among New York City prostitutes. Wallace has used government grants and a corporate sponsorship from LifeStyles, the condom company, to cobble together an AIDS-prevention program: she drives around the city in a white Dodge van (the “LifeStyles Care-Van, Sponsored by LifeStyles Condoms”), offering H.I.V. tests, distributing condoms, running a needle- exchange program, and trying, often unsuccessfully, to get prostitutes off the streets and into shelters. Wallace drives Goldsmith all over Manhattan, and each intersection seems more hopeless than the last. At Fifty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, prostitutes wear fur coats over lingerie, take their johns to fancy hotels, and “disdain” Wallace’s condoms. (“Not my brand,” one woman says.) Chelsea is less orderly, and around the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, “parked Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Cadillac cars containing prostitutes at work have become a familiar sight.” On the Lower East Side, on upper Park Avenue, and in Williamsburg, “the line between prostitution and desperation becomes blurred”: there, prices are pegged to the drug market, usually to the price of a vial of crack.